Classics of Fan History: The Frenzy of Renown

Okay, so it's not really about fan history, at least not throughout. But Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, published in 1986 by Oxford University Press, was one of the first scholarly books I had ever encountered that placed fame and its role in popular culture into an historical framework. When I first encountered the book in the late 1980s, I was struggling with how to make a living as a "music writer" and looking for a new path, and it convinced me of the legitimacy of studying popular culture at the graduate level. (The book's length alone--598 pages--was part of that. So much to learn! So much to argue about!). Soon I was off to earn a Ph.D.

This is not to say that I agree with everything Braudy says in the book. Braudy is a literary scholar (Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature at the University of Southern California), so the book's main arguments are based on the authority and logic of his interpretations of various historical and social texts. He's a great wit (“In a self-made country, who had not the potential to be self-made himself, with the help of an equally self-made audience?”), and often insightful, but the historical scope of the work also leads him to generalize about the motivations of entire groups of readers or audiences and to make broad declarations about "our" society. The ethnographer in me questions statements like: "The ease with which we allow ourselves to be absorbed by such images, the desires to be that way ourselves, confirms that the essential lure of the famous is that they are somehow more real than we and that our insubstantial physical reality needs that immortal substance for support." (6)

Despite such misgivings, however, I have always appreciated Braudy's recognition of audiences as a significant part of both culture and Culture; The Frenzy of Renown is one of the first modern scholarly works to recognize fandom as a phenomenon existing before the 20th century. In a remarkable section of the book, titled "The Advent of the Fan," Braudy pinpoints a significant shift in audience attitude and agency in the 18th century, especially with respect to authors who were availing themselves of new models of publishing that allowed the "rapid diffusion of books and pamphlets, portraits and caricatures." More and more facsimile texts available to more and more readers was a situation crucial in fostering new means for "introducing the famous to the fan." As Braudy says, "The most unprecedented element in the crucial changes the eighteenth century makes in the concept of fame is the appearance of an audience that, instead of passively responding to its idols, takes an active role in defining them, an audience that is willing to be manipulated but eager to convey how that ought to be done more expertly."

He writes specifically about the curious readers of Rousseau in the late 1700s, who used to seek him out at his home for conversation and to whom he responded with confusion and horror (Braudy's take is similar to Robert Darnton's acccount in The Great Cat Massacre, which was published around the same time as Frenzy of Renown, in 1984). Braudy also highlights James Boswell, the reader/fan/writer who continually crossed "the line between admiring and wanting to be like his idols." (382). Boswell, Braudy argues, was a "quintessential representative of the new audience," who, in celebrating an author like Samuel Johnson in his Life of Johnson, sought to join or even replace him. 

His [Boswell's] personal and explicit response to fame two hundred years ago so well lays out a syndrome of aspiration, achievement, and disgust with achievement that has become so familiar. Boswell's elaborate self-examination makes him a prime modern case of those who believe that fame and recognition will satisfy their desires to be complete, "uniform," and filled with character, only to discover that nothing is really sufficient to satisfy the hunger within.

After discussing the "democratization of fame" and the "natural performers" of the 19th century, Braudy discusses the consequences of such shifts in the United States of the 20th century, where selfhood, publicity, and worth are finally and intensely fused into a widespread competitive desire for self-recognition on the part of both the famous and their audiences. Fandom, in such a context, is a bellwether, because it:

mediates the disparity between the aspirations fostered by the culture and the relatively small increments of personal status possible in a mass society...even for the nonfan, there is a larger sense in which the expansion of the possibility for fame and the preoccupation with those who achieve it indicates a deep-seated uncertainty about the survival of individuality itself. Does the increasing complexity and sheer connectedness of the world--the question might run--mean more uniformity or does it mean that self-assertion might be taking on different shapes, unforeseen in the individualities of the past but somehow linked to them? 

I appreciate the linkage of fandom to changing ideas of selfhood, but because we don't actually hear from audience members in this book, it is difficult to evaluate Braudy's assertion about their uncertainty. In other ways, too, I would argue that Braudy's take on fandom is, ultimately, incomplete, because it is consistently positioned as a response to "emblematic figures" in history. (I don't think it is a coincidence that this book came out at a time when the "star system" was gaining currency in film studies). Fans of creative genres, styles, or of groups of people are not here. Nor is fandom perceived as anything other than a relationship with the object of one's fandom. 

Still, fandom emerges as a significant social force begging to be understood. For which publics, exactly, have the renowned displayed and enacted their selves? How have audiences paid attention and why? The intellectual breadth of this work, and its audacious linking of diverse "public men" and "performers" over centuries through the complex ideological framework of "fame," represents an impressive and lasting example of scholarly cultural history. 

Loving Lincoln

In honor of Lincoln's birthday, the American Antiquarian Society's Past is Present blog discusses sources on Lincoln and features a detail from an 1860 political cartoon, "The Republican Party Going to the Right House." The cartoon mocks depicting his supporters as social deviants, radicals, and crackpots, including pickpockets, free love advocates, Mormons, socialists, free blacks, and, yes, ardent followers. The woman closest to Lincoln (drawn with masculine features) treats him inappropriately like a celebrity, asserting her "passional attraction" to his "lovely face."

Over at the New York Times Opinionator online, Ted Widmer has published several linked articles that consider Lincoln's 1861 inauguration train tour in which he notes Lincoln's celebrity status and the frantic crowds that greeted him at stops:

Earlier inaugural journeys had also been public affairs. Washington’s trip from Mount Vernon to New York was a “prolonged coronation ceremony” – in Trenton, a chorus of “young virgins” threw flowers in his path, a custom we have wisely discontinued. Jackson’s journey from Tennessee was well-chronicled, as a westerner came in to clean the Augean stables of Washington. But nothing on the scale of Lincoln’s trip had ever happened. It had elements we recognize from our own time: the peculiar thrill of the traveling celebrity and his entourage, lurching from city to city, like a touring rock band (Tonight Only: Lincoln!); the frenzy of crowds, eager to catch a glimpse of this new American idol...

Finally, teacher and writer Jim Cullen, at his blog American History Now, has posted a tribute to Lincoln that brings the love of Lincoln into the present.

Classics of Fan History: Fandemonium!

Fred and Judy Vermorel's Fandemonium! The Book of Fan Cults and Dance Crazes, first published in 1989 and now out-of-print, continued the themes of their earlier work, Starlust (1985), by celebrating the excesses of pop culture fandom. While Starlust featured the sexual fantasies of fans for pop celebrities in the 1980s, Fandemonium! provided an historical context for that work, tracing the development of various kinds of public hysteria, celebrity cults, and dance manias in 20th-century Europe and the U.S. It was lavishly illustrated with images and press clippings, and designed with the cut'n'paste sensibility of a manic scrapbooker (as if the Vermorals could not keep up with the deluge of mass-mediated material coming at them).

The goal of the book was to highlight the "passions engendered by consumerism." Making loose connections to Tarantism and St. Vitus's Dance and modern forms of mania, the Vermorels focused on everything from the fan riots at the 1927 funeral of film star Rudolph Valentino to jitterbugging to Beatlemania to mosh pits. The "True Stories" chapter featured fragmentary descriptions of celebrity fans impersonating their idols, trying to touch stars, turning star-related merchandise into fetish objects, and stalking. Sections on rock'n'roll assessed the rise of "THE GIRL," a role of "no particular gender," defined by being excitable, vulnerable, and a "consumer idealist/ideal consumer." The book's visual content was intentionally provocative, highlighting the human body: people dancing wildly, fainting behind crowd-control barriers, or in various states of delirium and ecstasy at concerts.

When I first encountered this book, I was suspicious of the unabashed sensationalism of the Vermorels' approach. The connection they were trying to make between the "historical" and the "hysterical" seemed to me overly selective, ignoring less-demonstrative fans like book lovers or more-organized fans like baseball kranks. They used a definition of fandom that fully embraced the portrayals of journalists and other elitist critics of popular culture: fandom was about unruly mobs and stalkers rather than human enthusiasm and connection. And in a move typical of cultural studies work in the 1980s, it casually flipped Adorno-esque cultural critique on its head: the Vermorels asserted that fandom was not about control by the media and its star machinery but about resistance to that control.  Thus frenzy and chaos were specifically meaningful:

"But don't knock hysteria. It's not just an irrational force which sends people into self-destructive frenzy. It's also a problem-solving behavior which helps us make emotional sense out of cultural shock and social trauma. Through tis florid and erotic displays we symbolically negotiate our unspoken desires and quite literally 'shake off' constraints by affirming the instinct for pleasure.'"

Now, however, I recognize that this was one of the first works in fan studies to address the breadth of fandom's history, bringing together and juxtaposing diverse instances of fan-like behavior over time. Perhaps there is legitimate link between medieval epidemics, 19th-century manias, and modern fandom, even if it's only the discourses used to describe those behaviors. The Vermorels make that issue worth exploring in more depth. And while I still have serious reservations about the Vermorels' definition of fandom as simple fanaticism about stars and find their history distortedly selective, I can get behind some of their broader goals of doing fan history, as stated in their brief but brilliant "Afterword":

This book is about showbiz in its widest sense. It bypasses distinctions and truisms dear to particular tastes or specialisms. Like the difference between rock and pop. Or the origins of rock'n'roll somewhere between the blues and post-War teenage affluence...They all come out of a preoccupation with the stars' or industry's point of view. A history of kings and queens, coronations and abdications, which would seem ridiculously outmoded and woefully elitist in any other subject. 

Paradoxically, when you look at it from the consumer's vantage point, showbiz seems a more integrated phenomenon than is usually presented...Focusing on the pleasures, necessities and ambivalences of consuming popular entertainment, on all consumers of all popular entertainment, also creates a definition for showbiz beyond genre and fashion, even beyond particular media...

So often the critic/fan/prof is driven to imagine (or to wish) that the origins of showbiz fascination lie somehow or somewhere in the objects of this fascination....Whereas all the time it's only the fan who has the imagination and talent and tenacity to reinvent such fascinations every single day. The magic of stars is in the work of fans.

Fandom is wider and more significant than we thought, and history has a multiple vantage points. Can we continue to build new scholarship on those principles?

Celebrity

Celebrity, an important element in the history of fandom, is the theme of the Winter 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly. While I remain suspicious of theories that describe fan behavior as a mere byproduct of the cultural machinery of celebrity (with the associated hand-wringing about the superficiality of consumerism, modern life, etc., etc.), any historical understanding of audiencing needs to take into account the workings of public performance and fame. 

The issue collects some intriguing historical passages: Plato on Protagoras's "entourage" in 432 B.C., Heinrich Heine on Lisztomania in 1844, John Dos Passos on Rudolph Valentino's death in 1920, the "fan base" for Jesus in 30, Charles Mackay on Mesmerism in 1795, Charles Dickens on the readers hounding him in 1842, and other topics. No theorizing, really, except for Lewis Lapham's introductory essay, which tends to rely on the artificiality-thesis of Daniel Boorstin's The Image (1962). In its historical scope, the issue reminds me of Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown (1986), which I would recommend (and which I should re-read!).